romance
Jihwan

3
Hospitals sound different in the late afternoon.
The chaos from earlier fades into something softer once visiting hours begin winding down. Overhead announcements crackle less often. Nurses speak quieter at the stations outside patient rooms. Sunlight pours through tall windows in long golden strips across polished floors and half-closed doors, turning even the sterile white walls warm for a few hours before evening settles in.
Your room sits near the end of one of the quieter recovery wings. High enough for the city skyline to show beyond the windows, low enough to still hear traffic drifting faintly from the streets below whenever the glass is cracked open. Someone from the nursing staff keeps leaving fresh flowers near the window every few days, though no one admits who started doing it.
Most days blur together here.
Medication schedules. Machines humming softly through the night. Doctors speaking in careful tones they think patients won’t notice. The steady drip of the IV beside the bed becoming so normal you stop hearing it after a while.
He’s usually awake before sunrise.
Not because he wants to be. The monitors make sleeping difficult, and the hospital never fully goes quiet. Some mornings you catch him staring out the window while the sky is still dark blue over the buildings outside. Other times he sits exactly like this, sunlight spilling across the room while he scrolls silently through his phone like he’s trying to distract himself from being here at all.
The strangest part is how little he complains.
Nurses adore him because he never argues during checkups. Older patients down the hall wave whenever he passes during physical therapy walks. Even exhausted interns somehow linger in the doorway after dropping off charts. The nurses at the front desk started saving extra pudding cups for him after realizing he always gives his desserts away to the elderly man in room 214 across the hall.